School rejected city's $4.3 million offer without a counter

The city of Encinitas engaged in a good faith effort to buy the old Pacific View school, but the Encinitas Union School District wouldn’t negotiate, the city’s mayor and the city manager said Wednesday night.

“It was a non-traditional negotiation,” Mayor Teresa Barth said with a wry smile.

City Manager Gus Vina aid he doesn’t think school district officials took the city’s $4.3 million purchase offer very seriously, and declined to counter it.

“When you make an offer, you expect at least a counter-offer,” he told a reporter just after Wednesday night’s City Council meeting concluded.

The district didn’t provide one, and it refused to go into mediation, he added.

City officials submitted their offer in December to buy the 2.6-acre, former school property, which occupies a prime coastal bluff-top spot along downtown’s Third Street. The district’s board rejected the offer in a closed-door meeting later that month. The board met again last week, and decided to pursue selling the property at auction.

District Superintendent Tim Baird said Friday --- the day after the board’s auction decision --- that the city’s offer was ridiculously low and that’s why the board now is planning to sell the land to the highest bidder. District officials had expected at least $7.5 million --- the figure a nonprofit arts organization offered some two years ago for the land, Baird said.

Barth and Vina said Wednesday night that they knew the city’s offer was at the low end, but thought that would be a starting point for negotiations. Vina said city officials took all the proper steps to make the purchase happen. They had the property appraised, they did a site walk-through, they held four council subcommittee meetings on the topic, and then the city submitted its purchase offer, he said.

In response, they got a letter from the district, announcing that its board had rejected the offer, Vina said. In that same letter, the district asked what it needed to do now rezone the property for other uses, he added.

Barth said she learned of the school board’s decision to auction off the property when a reporter called her Friday.

The school board is scheduled to settle the details of its auction proposal at its Jan. 21 meeting. A day later, the City Council expects to receive a report on various Pacific View-issues, Barth said. Among other things, council members have asked for information on rezoning, on state regulations regarding school land sales and on the imminent domain process where a government agency can acquire private land from an unwilling seller. This is informational material; the council has given no direction to city staff on what steps to take next, Barth said.

The city’s purchase offer is the latest of many proposals for the school site. The district closed the school in 2003, citing declining enrollment. In the years since then, everything from housing projects to a community art center have been suggested for the land.